No evidence 4.5 million killed by climate change each year

Former U.S. Vice President and environmentalist Al Gore is silhouetted against an image of the earth during his talk about climate change in Manila, Philippines, Tuesday, June 8, 2010.

Sen. Pat Moynihan is credited with the saying that "everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they're not entitled to their own facts." Ryan Pleune expects us to believe that 4.5 million people per year are killed by climate change ("Climate change deaths," April 7). There is no evidence that 4.5 million or any other number of people are killed annually by climate change.

There is no dispute that the earth has warmed about 0.8 degrees C (1.4 degrees F) since about 1900, although there is some disagreement about the causes of that warming. Considering that the seasonal variations in temperature are generally greater than 60 degrees F, it strains credulity to assert that people are dying because of a change that occurred over a period of more than a hundred years and that was less than one-twentieth that which occurs every six months. One could experience greater variation than 0.8C simply by moving a few miles north or south.

Let us dispense with the pretense that we need massive public spending to save the lives of 4.5 million people and instead speculate about the motives certain people have for advocating actions that would quickly destroy our economic system to no effect on global climate change.